Breitbart sees huge advertising drop in May: report

Per Digiday’s MediaRadar, which tracks ads on websites, Breitbart had 242 brands appearing on its website in March, but had just 26 in May.

Breitbart -- once described as "a platform for the alt-right" by former chairman Steve Bannon, who now serves as chief strategist to President Trump -- enjoyed its best year in its 10-year history in 2016, Trump dominated headlines during the campaign and after his election.

Overall, according to Alexa, an Amazon analytics company, Breitbart generated 2 billion pageviews in 2016, had 45 million unique monthly visitors and was ranked as the 29th in overall traffic.

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Breitbart had fallen precipitously to 281st place by the end of May, according to Alexa.

But a Breitbart spokesman tells The Hill that a glitch led to the precipitous drop.

"Alexa decertified Breitbart due to a 'glitch' on their end and apologized to us after we pointed out the problem," says spokesman Chad Wilkinson. "Once we were recertified, our ranking shot way back up to 60th."

In addition to Bannon's departure in the summer of 2016, Breitbart has lost key figures from its writing staff, including Milo Yiannopoulos after his controversial statements that seemed to condone pedophilia, and most recently, Katie McHugh, who tweeted this week that Great Britain wouldn't suffer terror attacks if Muslims weren't in the country.

Consumer boycotts from liberal activist groups such as SumOfUs, Care2, MoveOn.org,and UltraViolet have also impacted Breitbart’s advertising base, according to the Digiday report.